1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a biological tissue processing substrate, a processing apparatus, a processing method and a processing kit. More particularly, the present invention relates to a biological tissue processing substrate for fixing proteins or degradation products of proteins in biological tissues as a preprocessing for analyzing biological tissues.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently importance of analysis of protein, a gene product existing in the body, has received attention through progress of genome analysis. Among others, the importance of protein analysis on tissue slice has been noted. For example, many attempts to elucidate proteins involved in recurrence or metastasis from cancer tissue slice have been made. As for well known examples in these analytical means, following means are known.
These are (1) extraction of proteins from biological tissues and cells; (2) separation of proteins; (3) analysis of proteins or degradation products of proteins; and (4) identification of the thus obtained analytical results.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-537561 discloses, as a means for extraction of proteins in biological tissues, a method comprising extracting cell population from biological tissues by using laser and solubilizing the proteins contained in the cell population into a solution containing surface active agents, etc. The solubilized proteins by such method is isolated and analyzed by mass spectrometry, etc.
Further, information acquisition method and information acquisition apparatus based on TOF-SIMS (time of flight secondary ion mass spectrometry) for the purpose of visualizing two-dimensional distribution of protein on the biological tissue slice have been disclosed in the pamphlet of International Publication No. WO2005/003715A2. This method discloses such that ionization promoting substance and/or digestive enzyme are directly supplied to the biological tissue slice by using ink-jet method. Information relating to a type of proteins (including information on specific degradation of peptide by digestive enzyme) is visualized with maintaining the location information thereof by TOF-SIMS.
In Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-537561, since the protein is extracted from the population of cells, the method disclosed in the publication is not suited to specify individually from what cells the detected protein is derived. Further, according to the description disclosed in International Publication No. WO 2005/003715 A2, information on protein distribution in some biological tissues can be obtained. However, in case of obtaining two-dimensional distribution information with good accuracy by using such method, the solution for digestive enzyme treatment should be supplied individually to micro-regions on the biological tissue slice.
If two-dimensional distribution of proteins in specific lesioned cells such as cancer cells, or proteins in cells to neighboring cancer cells, or both can be analyzed more precisely by the analytical method of proteins in the biological tissue, such the method can be contributed to development of diagnostic device and drug discovery device.